7 - Developing a Painter's Eye

Summary

The picture of life. — The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest of painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own — and nothing else is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a firm and lasting image, as a “the,” in something else in course of becoming.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

MILLER'S TEXTS REGULARLY ENGAGE in discourse on the arts, specifically painting and literature (and occasionally music). Throughout these works, Miller makes extensive direct citations and references as well as oblique allusions to texts, paintings, writers, painters, and musicians. Such widespread traces of these arts in Miller's texts mediate both the narrator and the reader's relation to the text and to the world. Taking Miller's interest in painting as its focus, this chapter explores the manner in which Miller engages his reader via “literary images” in his writing. By means of ekphrastic writing — using one artistic medium to remark on another; in this case, painting through writing — the reader encounters the world of the depicted art. Yet there is more at stake in Miller than simply perspectival representation or an attempt to illuminate the qualities and form of painting through writing. The ways in which these artistic elements enter Miller's texts are not always straightforward and are in fact multifarious.